Still beautiful

I was driving through the central hills on Saturday and took this photograph of fallow deer gathered under an oak tree. I think it is one of the best photographs I have taken. It seems to sum up the county in 2008 – still beautiful and unchanging.



Elsewhere the countryside is not in such good condition. This article (above - it you click on the image you should just about be able to read it) in the Observer is a piece of scare-mongering journalism that tells us the apple harvest is under threat because of changes to the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Scheme. Incredibly the journalist Caroline Davies makes no connection between low wages and lack of workers (was she too lazy to do the research, or did she willfully seek to mislead?).

We do not need to import cheap labour from Russia to pick English apples. All we need to do is pay a realistic wage for local people to pick the fruit. In any case, smaller family-owned farms always have a network of local people who come in to the farms to harvest crops – it’s the bigger farms that need hundreds of workers at rock-bottom wages.

The problem (once again) is the big supermarkets. They are prepared to flood the British market with ultra-cheap apples from the southern hemisphere (grown in industrial mono-cultures) if English apples cannot be produced at uneconomic prices. Why is the government so afraid of the four main supermarket chains (and why can’t they be broken up, with an anti-cartel clause that specifies no more than fifty outlets per chain?).

Personally I am unimpressed by complaints that food is too expensive (in real terms it is cheaper than it was two decades ago). We don’t need cheap food that encourages people to overeat. We need good-quality food locally produced and sold at a price that is fair to everyone.